Don’t bother with all the little things So after I did quite a bit of research and found out task killers are not only useless but actually detrimental to the proper functioning of your Android phone, I read all sorts of tips espousing little things you can do to save battery: dim the screen brightness, turn off GPS, switch to Edge only (not 3G), turn off automatic syncing. Most of these things all help a little bit but not really enough to make it worth the trouble. And, in the case of GPS, sometimes they don’t help at all. GPS, for example, isn’t really on even if it’s “on” unless you’re using an app that actively uses GPS (e.g., Google Maps, Google Navigation, Yelp). If I constantly dimmed the screen and then made it brighter when I needed it and turned off syncing and synced only when I needed it, I could eke out maybe an extra hour or hour and a half of battery life. It seemed a lot of maintenance for very little return.

Use Juice Defender It took me a year and a half of using Android before I stumbled upon and finally tried Juice Defender. This app easily doubled my battery life. I used to have my phone run from 7:30 AM to 11:30 PM at night but with only 15-20% of my battery left when I plugged it back into the charger at night. With Juice Defender, I had 50-60% of my battery left at night. There are a lot of things Juice Defender can do if you get the paid versions, which allow you to tweak settings even further, but on a basic level with the free version it turns off your data when your screen is off and then turns it back on again when your screen is on.

Even though I would highly recommend JD to anyone with an Android phone who also wants to get the most out of her battery life, there are a couple of annoying things with the program. Firstly, it insists on having a huge icon in the notification bar all the time. Well, there’s a setting to not keep it there, but apparently if you don’t keep it in the notification bar the Android OS might accidentally turn off Juice Defender to free up RAM. Secondly, it takes a few seconds for data to turn back on after your screen is on. This last little niggle led to me uninstalling Juice Defender and opting for another alternative.

Or just turn off data when you don’t need it You kind of have to think about your own phone-using lifestyle to see what will make more sense to you—turning data off every time your screen is off (Juice Defender) or just manually turning off data when you don’t need it. For my lifestyle, it makes a lot more sense for me to turn data off manually. I’m grateful for the work the Juice Defender folks are doing in showing me how to save battery life, but the extra few seconds to wait for data to turn back on were just too much for me, the way I use my Android phone.

I basically have some periods in which I’m using my phone pretty heavily (but only in short spurts) for data and then longer periods when I’m not using my phone for data at all. So I have a power widget on my home screen for toggling data. When I’m about to use data, I turn it on. When I know I won’t be using data for a long period of time (2-3 hours or more), I turn it off.

I hope people have found these tips helpful. Post if you have any questions. (Any attempts to promote task killers will be immediately deleted as spam.)